Michael Rubin's Iran Needs an Insurgency is remarkable less for what it says than for how late it arrives. He has suddenly discovered that Iran needs an insurgency. Welcome to the debate.
The only problem is that the very movement Rubin has spent more than two decades disparaging has been waging precisely such a struggle since 1981. Long before Rubin concluded that organized resistance was indispensable, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK) had already built a nationwide resistance network, established Resistance Units across Iran, and paid an extraordinary price in blood for confronting the regime. Rubin is not advancing a new idea so much as catching up to a reality he has spent years denying.
To reconcile that contradiction, he resorts to a grotesque distortion of history, claiming that the MEK "supported Khomeini" and stood "against the Iranian people." Rubin was just eight years old when the Shah fell in 1979. He was neither a participant in, nor a witness to the events, actors, and grievances that shaped revolutionary Iran. His account is therefore necessarily based on retrospective analysis rather than lived experience. Yet it is precisely his reading of the historical record that is at issue, as many of his claims are undermined by the available evidence.
Rubin is, of course, entitled to interpret history. He is not entitled to rewrite it in a manner that echoes the talking points of the Iranian regime's intelligence services. Like millions of Iranians, the MEK opposed the Shah's dictatorship. But unlike many of Khomeini's early supporters, it rejected the doctrine of velayat-e faqih from the outset, refused to submit to the emerging theocracy, and paid a devastating price for doing so. Tens of thousands of its members were imprisoned, tortured, and executed.
His account of the Iran-Iraq war is equally misleading. The MEK opposed Iraq's invasion of Iran from the very outset. Many of its members fought against Iraqi forces, were killed in combat, or were taken prisoner during the conflict. Throughout the war, the organization consistently defended Iran's territorial integrity and national sovereignty.
However, after Iraqi forces had withdrawn from Iranian territory in June 1982, the MEK began advocating for peace, arguing that the continuation of the conflict no longer served Iran's national interests but instead benefited the ruling regime by providing a pretext for domestic repression and political consolidation.
The MEK did not establish its presence in Iraq until four years later, in 1986, and after Iraq had publicly accepted the National Council of Resistance of Iran's peace plan as a workable basis for achieving a negotiated settlement of the conflict in 1983. That plan had garnered the support of more than 5,000 parliamentarians, party leaders, and international dignitaries. The organization's stated objective was not to wage war against Iran, but to confront Khomeini's war machine, target the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and increase pressure on the regime to accept U.N. Security Council Resolution 598 and bring the war to an end.
Khomeini ultimately caved, famously describing the ceasefire as drinking a "chalice of poison." The real historical scandal remains that Khomeini dragged out the war for six devastating years after 1982 solely to chase his ideological ambitions under the banner of "liberating Jerusalem via Karbala," sacrificing hundreds of thousands of Iranian lives in the process.
Rubin also laments those in the West who pursued accommodation with Tehran. Yet one of the most notorious acts of appeasement was the politically motivated designation of the MEK as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time, the designation was explicitly intended as a "goodwill gesture to Tehran and its newly elected moderate president, Mohammad Khatami." While Rubin criticizes figures like Secretary Madeleine Albright for engaging the regime, this designation was a far more consequential concession, one that punished the principal democratic opposition while fueling the illusion that moderation could emerge from within a theocracy.
Furthermore, Rubin resurrects the familiar allegation that the MEK targeted civilians, yet he again fails to cite a single verifiable example beyond claims originating from the Iranian regime's propaganda apparatus. The historical record tells a different story. As the Congressional Research Service noted in Report RS20871, the MEK's operations“were directed primarily against Iranian government and military targets.”
This assessment was later reinforced by judicial investigations in Europe, most notably by French antiterrorism magistrate Marc Trévidic, whose exhaustive, years-long inquiry led to the dismissal of all terrorism allegations against the movement. As Judge Trévidic concluded, "The case file contains no evidence of any armed action directed against the civilian population."
In the end, invective is easier than evidence. Rubin offers the former; years of independent investigations produced the latter.
Most revealing is Rubin's sudden pivot to advocating armed resistance against the IRGC and Basij. He now argues that the regime's enforcers must be made to fear the consequences of their actions, yet he continues to denounce the very movement that has been practicing this logic for years at enormous personal risk. The reality of that resistance was underscored on February 23, when 250 MEK fighters struck Khamenei's compound in Tehran. Writing in RealClearDefense, former CIA Deputy Director for the National Clandestine Service John Sano noted that the operation revealed not only tactical daring, but also a remarkable degree of human intelligence penetration and logistical sophistication inside the regime's most heavily protected stronghold.
With at least eleven MEK members executed in recent months and thirteen more on death row, these Resistance Units continue to challenge the theocracy directly.
The broader question is not whether every chapter in the history of the Iranian Resistance is beyond criticism. No movement shaped by revolution, war, exile, and repression is immune from scrutiny. The real question is whether the Iranian people can overcome one of the world's most entrenched authoritarian systems without organization, strategy, sacrifice, and a viable democratic alternative.
If Iran's future depends on more than diplomacy, symbolism, and wishful thinking, then the debate should focus on the strengths, weaknesses, and realities of the existing opposition rather than on caricatures of it. The West does not need to manufacture an insurgency in Iran. It needs to stop echoing Tehran's narrative against the one that already exists.
Michael Rubin has finally arrived at a conclusion the Iranian Resistance reached long ago. The problem isn't the opposition; the problem is that Rubin is more than four decades late to the party.
Ali Safavi is a sociologist, is an official of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). He is on X @amsafavi
